WD, a Western Digital company and a world leader in hard drives, today announced its highest performance, highest capacity desktop hard drive, the WD Black 4 TB, 3.5-inch, 7200 RPM drive. Shipping immediately, the fast performance and ultimate capacity of the award-winning WD Black drives make them perfect for gaming, high-performance desktop systems and workstations.

"Maximizing the features and functionality of power computing applications such as gaming, multimedia and video editing, the new WD Black 4 TB hard drives offer capacity and performance—without compromise," said Matt Rutledge, vice president of WD's client storage group. "In choosing WD Black hard drives, WD desktop customers get the best possible mix of capacity, performance and reliability to handle intense desktop computing with ease."

WD Black 4 TB hard drives feature the following:

- Dual processor – Twice the processing power to maximize performance.
- Dual actuator technology – A head positioning system with two actuators that improves positional accuracy over the data track(s). The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy.
- IntelliSeek – Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.
- StableTrac – The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations.
- NoTouch ramp load technology – The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.

Here in Sweden prices are almost back to pre flood level. I managed to snag two 2TB Seagate HDDs (one internal, one external) for around 60$ each on a sale, very happy with them.
When it comes to HDD, it seems like the highest capacity ones always have a problem until Seagate/WD manage to write some new firmware or do some new revisions, it's probably always safer, and even economical, to go with a slightly lower capacity one.

I don't care how close it is to pre-flood levels; it's still not AT pre-flood levels. And this is technology we're talking about -- I don't expect to pay more for any piece of technology, let alone 2 fucking years later (after it was sold for a lot less), just because two asshole companies have made a monopoly out of the market by buying out every single competitor and building their manufacturing plants in locations that are likely to flood, to use this as an excuse to charge the dumb average consumer a lot more money for the company's own mistake.

Therefore I will not buy their shitty hard drives. The same way I wouldn't buy Intel processors if they did a similar thing and built their manufacturing plants in Antarctica, and then doubled the prices of their products because the iceberg they were floating on melted and they needed a new fab plant.

I will buy 10x SSDs at reduced prices before I ever buy a hard drive that's priced ABOVE its old sale price.

And storage technology has moved on far further than it ever did. Flash prices have hit rock bottom and universities are at a breakthrough point in being about to make storage devices with hundreds of terabytes of storage possible with DNA sequencing -- in 5 years time, I expect hard drives to follow the way of the floppy disks, as well as the companies producing them (Seagate and WD) going out of business.

if the picture is actually correct... have you noticed it's 4TB on THREE platters?

that's pretty darn amazing!, 1.33 TB per plate, no idea if they're using the same density as the 3TB ones... (i think not, the 3TB AFAIK are 1TB per plate).

and here i am happy with my 500GB/plate HDD.

in any case, i'll be more interested in a green(read: cheap) version of this drive as such massive size is only good for linear storage in my book (video files)

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Looks like one of their stock photos. However, it gained very little weight against the 2TB model. Perhaps it is only 3 platters. Also, it's top speed is listed at 154MB/s vs 138MB/s which could be due to increased density.

I've been running REs for years. No issues. Greens, blues, and blacks on the other hand, didn't hold up in an array (lack of TLER) and die much faster. WD Reds have TLER. My 750gb REs (6 of them) are going on 5 years now. They replaced 6 older 250gb REs that I sold off to a friend who's still running them. It's more then just marketing.

I don't think there are any current harddrives I'd trust putting 4gb worth of data on. Maybe a large mirror array using RE series drives but definitely not WD Blacks.

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You def. need two. I got two 3 TB seagates, wonderfully quiet, mirrored with snycback pro. I figure that setup is not system specific, easy to migrate and not capable of copying corruption between drives.

I thought its Highest-performing hard drives are the Velociraptor series??

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WD considers the Velociraptor a Workstation drive. Of course, they just label it for marketing purposes. It use to be a Server drive until they developed a SAS version of it (WD XE). Now they can diversify even more by having a so-called workstation segment and manipulate PR verbiage.

It's a 4 platter i'm guessing. Each platter 1TB. It's a tech WD has for quite some time now.

My older WD Black 2TB is using an older 500GB per platter design, but is till have 4 platters. I don't think they'll go beyond that point. My drive already takes some time to spin up 4 platters, i don't think having 5 of them would make things better. Besides, if 1TB per platter is there, i don't see any reason not to use it.

I've been running REs for years. No issues. Greens, blues, and blacks on the other hand, didn't hold up in an array (lack of TLER) and die much faster. WD Reds have TLER. My 750gb REs (6 of them) are going on 5 years now. They replaced 6 older 250gb REs that I sold off to a friend who's still running them. It's more then just marketing.

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That is nice, and I've got hundreds of drives in use, and the REs fail just as quickly as anything else.

That is nice, and I've got hundreds of drives in use, and the REs fail just as quickly as anything else.

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That's my point. I'm sure they (Black vs. RE) have similar physically construction and equally prone to failure but I've had good luck with REs and the Blacks have been fairly reliable compared to other offerings. I was trying to point out that it's a pretty large risk putting 4tb of data on a single drive. Blacks do not support RAID so it's risky business. 4tb is alot of data to do manual backups. Maybe the firmware could be modified? That is the only limiting factor for consumer drives in RAID use. The 4tb capacity may be alluring to people with large media collections. If I had a collection that large, I wouldn't want to loose it and lack of RAID support takes this drive off my list of secure storage options.